Kusuo Kitamura

Kusuo Kitamura was a Japanese swimmer born on 9 October 1917 and died on 6 June 1996. He was born in Kōchi and was one of the youngest members of the Japanese team at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where he won the gold medal in the men's 1500 metre freestyle at the age of 14 years and 309 days. That made him the youngest ever Olympic swimming gold medalist until Hungary's Krisztina Egerszegi won the women's 200 metre backstroke at the 1988 Games in Seoul, and he still holds the record for the youngest male swimmer to win Olympic gold. After 1932 he retired from competitive sport, graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and took a job at the Japanese Ministry of Labor, rising to department head before leaving in 1984 to become a director at Sumitomo Cement.